An estimated 750-acre wildfire on the Nevada National Security Site was reported contained Wednesday, after burning for at least two days.
“No injuries reported, and no impact to mission facilities or assets,” according to a Twitter post for the Department of Energy nuclear-weapon site.
The site is investigating the cause of the fire, which was unknown at deadline.
“There was lightning in the area where the fire started, so we’re speculating that may be the source,” a spokesperson for the site said Thuesday. However, at this time, we do not have confirmation.”
The DOE facility first acknowledged the fire Monday, also in a Twitter post. At that time, the blaze “in [a] remote central section of [the] Site,” was estimated at about 100 acres. Later in the day, the fire had spread across about 200 acres. By Tuesday, the flames ranged over three times that area, according to the site.
Still, that is only a small fraction of the roughly 1,300 square miles at the Nevada National Security Site — more than 850,000 acres.
The site’s own fire department, with help from the federal Bureau of Land Management, is fighting the fire.
Representatives for the Nevada National Security Site did not reply by deadline to a query seeking updates about the fire, including its cause.
The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration conducts non-yield-sustaining plutonium-explosive tests deep underground at the Nevada National Security Site: the former Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. tested many nuclear-weapon designs underground, at full yield, during the Cold War.
The agency prepares these tests at the site’s above-ground Device Assembly Facility, which is also the temporary home of some 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium shipped in 2018 from the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. By 2021, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to start shipping this plutonium to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it will help produce fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits for future intercontinental ballistic missiles.
